In the production of metal components, in particular car body components, the production process has to satisfy various requirements. For example, in the production of car body components it is particularly important to satisfy the required strength properties with as low a component weight as possible, and also minimise the production costs. In order to meet these requirements various strategies are adopted in production processes for metal components and car body components of the prior art.
One possibility of reducing the component weight while retaining the same strength is to use variable wall thicknesses within a component. For example, in DE 10 2007 030 388 A1 a method and a device are disclosed for producing a hardened sheet metal component, in which flexibly rolled materials, so-called “Tailored Rolled Blanks”, are used. Alternatively blanks of different wall thicknesses welded to one another, so-called “Tailored Welded Blanks”, can also be used to produce metal components. A further possibility of optimising the weight of car body components from the prior art is to use embossed metal sheets. In this method a blank in the cold state is cold rolled between two rollers. At least one of the rollers has on its surface the structure required for the embossing. The employed material can be fed as a coil or, cut to length, as an individual blank to the roller. After the embossing the material is normally packaged and transported to the processing site. In order to provide crash-optimised components, inter alia the structure of the cold-rolled embossed blanks must be altered at the processing site. This is carried out for example by localised application of heat. The disadvantage of these methods from the prior art is that the production costs of crash-optimised components are raised. Furthermore, on account of the cold embossing rolling there is an increased wear of the rollers because of high rolling forces.
The technical object of the invention is accordingly to provide a method in which the production costs for crash-optimised components are reduced and at the same time there is reduced wear of the rollers.